A friend recently linked to a site called “The Ugly Dance“, which is a dynamic music video for a swedish rock band. The music is okay, but what really got me is how much fun manipulating the paperdoll / ragdoll character that they display on screen, and thought “it would be great if you could print that character out and play with it too!” In Qatar last year I did a bit of experimentation with sending Sprite/ Movieclip data straight through to the printer without displaying them on screen, and with the numerous webcam experiments I have done I’m pretty confident about taking cam data and putting it into sprites or bitmaps. The only thing missing from being able to produce a good, jointed paper doll that could just be printed out – especially one that could work without having to buy split pins.
It was an idle thought, until the other night when I found I couldn’t sleep, so I came up with this model for a paper split pin, and I decided to try it out this afternoon.. the result is what you see before you!
It turned out to take a lot longer than I had anticipated – the pins do work and they are quite tight, but you need to assemble them with a pair of tweezers. That said, though, it was only printed on 90GSM inkjet paper.. I would like to try it on heavier stock to see if it makes it easier. In the meantime though, If you’d like to try for yourself, though, The PDF Download is here: Brandel Zachernuk’s Paperguy v0.01. If anyone finds a use for it or makes any modification, I’d love to see it!
